THE STATE AND MADNESS IN MEDIEVAL ISLAM

Extract

Michael W. Dols's posthumously published Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford, 1992) is a magnum opus, a voluminous enterprise, and a piece of meticulous research that equals—if not surpasses—Dols's earlier work on plagues in medieval Islam. Dianne E. Immisch, Dols's long-time research assistant who took up the job of seeing the manuscript to the press, briefly points out in her Foreward the richness of topics dealt with in the book. Indeed, writing about madness in a particular society involves the history of medicine, law, and other subfields, but it is above all a study in the history of culture, certainly from the perspective of the present, when there is increased interest in the formation of categories of deviancy. The attitude of a society toward madness and its mad people is a crucial cultural topic—a “big issue,” as one reviewer has put it.²